


Diegesis

by scintillio_coll



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-01
Updated: 2016-12-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 13:54:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5872900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scintillio_coll/pseuds/scintillio_coll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He was right before, about people being moments in time, the Force remembering who they are in unalterable ways. </p><p>Kylo Ren is a sinkhole. He is her first memory of cold, of snow, of moisture that is unwelcome. If she and Luke are smoothed by sand then he is the jagged edge of a glacier's path."</p><p>the slowest of burns.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. metonymy

**Author's Note:**

> well...now this is happening. because i am trash and you are trash and screw it, let's be happy. 
> 
> i admit i'm no expert on the EU so if i fuck anything up too terribly please let me know.

He hisses the first time their skin touches, mere seconds after their eyes meet; a light brush of knuckles to finger tips as he pushes the lightsaber back towards her.

_Tatooine_

The thought is like a pebble in her shoe; tangible, hard, and suddenly on the inside when it most surely should not be.

"Jakku," she murmurs, eyes widening at his immediate and undetectable presence in her head. If possible, he looks both relieved and disappointed at her answer. "My name is-"

"Rey," he answers aloud this time, smiling a bit grimly. His voice is hoarse, he glances at the weapon in her hand, "And you know who I am."

She nods, he nods, they walk together along the cliffs.

 

\----------

 

Those first days they do nothing but talk about their deserts. They fish and discuss thirst. They cook and debate dunes. They ready for bed and consider the nuances of sweat, sun, sand. Always sand. It always comes back to that.

"You looked like sand to me," he explains one afternoon, scratching at his scalp and it's that same lopsided, self-deprecating grin. "It's strange, how the force can look in people, like moments or places or unconscious thoughts. You're..." he shrugs, "smoothed by sand, same as me."

She opens her mouth to respond but every word flees.

"It's not a bad thing," he assures her, tossing a small rock into the still water of his sheltered inlet. "I could feel that you miss it. It...made me miss it. I never thought I would."

He stands and rakes his hand through his tangled hair, "My father hated the sand."

They begin training the next day.

 

\----------

 

He uses their homes as metaphors and she understands all the better for it. The Force is the wind in the desert. It shapes without an agenda, neither malicious nor merciful. And, eventually, if something is buried, it brings it back up.

Nothing is buried by sand forever.

 

\----------

 

"We can talk about him," he says lightly, rolling up the sleeves of his tunic as she tosses a woven sack of mussels to his feet.

She wrings out her hair, "Talk about who?"

He just raises his eyebrows in a way that's very _you tell me_ and squats, emptying the pouch into a shallow bowl. She huffs out a laugh and settles cross-legged across from him on the packed dirt outside their shared home. She shifts at the dunes between them, willing up a breeze, shaping the sand until there's a clear line of sight between their minds.

He was right before, about people being moments in time, the Force remembering who they are in unalterable ways.

Kylo Ren is a sinkhole. He is her first memory of cold, of snow, of moisture that is unwelcome. If she and Luke are smoothed by sand then he is the jagged edge of a glacier's path.

She throws herself out, hanging Jakku's blistering sun back up in her sky.

"Oh, him." Luke doesn't seem nearly as unbalanced as she assumed he might. Far from as off kilter as she feels. "Won't that be painful for you?"

"Rey," it comes out a little patronizing as he whets a small blade against a small stone, her name spoken out loud and inside. "Of course it will. Maybe I need that."

Nothing stays buried forever.

Because what she hears echoing up from the canyons of Tatooine is

_Maybe I deserve that_

 

\----------

 

It's months before he lets her turn on the lightsaber. It's even longer before she brings up his nephew.

She's got a read on him now, not just as a teacher or a Jedi or a legend. But as a man, a brother, someone with their own sense of humor, taste in food, a roommate with idiosyncrasies and habits. It feels like time, like if they're going to get to know each other more intimately, trust each other more explicitly, then she needs to cauterize their mismatched wounds. 

So she simply asks the question, just barely cracks open the door, _What went wrong?_

“He was just...powerful, too powerful to be left alone, not when there was so much potential for, you know," Luke's prosthetic hand clenches a bit, "collateral damage."

He's silent for a long moment and she somehow knows he's deciding how honest is honest enough.

"I never wanted to train him," he finally confesses, poking at the burned down embers of their nightly fire.

He says this without any inflection, flat, unfeeling but when Rey reaches out, she's reassured by the fierce wind that whips around a fixed point in his head. 

"Why not? He was your family," she wonders, and quickly flicks aside a touch of frustration when a hand gesture says _think it through yourself_. She breaths in deeply, slipping just barely into a meditative mindset, and begins to push shapes into the desert.

"Because you had never trained anyone with that much power before," she knows that's not right before the sound fully dies.

“You didn’t want to become too attached. Because he is family." Luke just cocks his head.

"He was _your_ family. You were afraid he was too much like your father." Luke looks guilty for the first time but she know she's still off the mark. The sand shifts and it's glaring and obvious and it breaks her heart a little.

"You were afraid he was too much like _his_ father."

The remainder of a log snaps, sparks etching cryptic patterns into the air, indistinguishable from the stars.

"I loved Han," Luke whispers like it's an explanation.

_But he would have been a shit Jedi_

 

\----------

 

He watches her practice battle forms with the lightsaber along the gravel beach, sprawled in the shade beneath a small outcropping. He uses his stubby knife to whittle two lengths of driftwood into serviceable practice blades. 

She's just beginning to pant when his voice nearly makes her lose her footing. 

"I might start lying to you, Rey."

She rights herself, transitioning smoothly into the next stance and decides to save her breath, instead sending a inquiring  _?!_ towards him.  

He shrugs, swinging the rugged staff over his head in a well practiced arc.

"People will always lie to you, sometimes they may not even know it. They'll lie to themselves so well they start to believe. But the Force can't deceive, the Force will always show you what's true and what's not. It'll tell you if I'm being misleading. It's a good skill to work on."

She finishes a set of moves, abandoning the rest of the sequence and turns to him. He seems relaxed, tunic sleeves rucked up to his elbows, one bushy eyebrows quirked at her stare. But even this, now that she's aware, prodding at her guts for the feeling of sincerity, feels a little off. 

"You're lying now."

His metal hand clacks against the gravel as he hefts himself up, tossing one of the finished faux sabers to her. 

"Am I?" he seems genuinely curious. 

"You're scared that you might be one of those people. That you're falling for your own lies. You...what? Want me to vet every word that comes out of your mouth?"

In that moment she knows his training, as directionless as it may seem, is working. She feels no anger, no frustration, just the tiniest sliver of fear.

"I've been alone with my mistakes for a long time, Rey, I don't want history to repeat itself."

"What can we be if we don't trust each other?"

He laughs in a blindingly honest way, "A bit more like normal people, I guess." 

 

\----------

 

They attack one another with necessary ferocity, swinging their wooden swords with authentic force; the demonstrative bruises speckling both of their bodies is proof enough of that. 

These moments are becoming her favorite; when she's allowed to feel powerful and keyed up and dangerous. When the Force is guiding her like a vessel, piloting with complete righteousness. 

Ironically (or maybe appropriately, who is she to say who Luke has been), this is when he's most open, too. He's always forthright with her, sometimes to a fault, but in these sessions he's lighter, more candid. He's chatty, almost, she thinks, if that wasn't such a vapid word to use for the galaxy's most powerful man. 

"You'll want to use that to your advantage, in a real battle. If your opponent likes to talk, let them. Let them distract themselves, let them waste their own breath."

She's not sure when it happened, but she's no longer bothered when he plucks thoughts out of her head. It's oddly comforting, in fact. It keeps her from having to ask questions she isn't sure he wants to answer. 

"But that's not what you want to talk about," he's barely out of breath as she hurriedly swipes a wrist across her sweaty brow, frantically readjusting her grip to block a downward strike. "You want to talk about Han.”

She has enough time to nod before spinning on one foot, disengaging their weapons and opening up the field.

“Think about the Jedi Code, Rey. _Emotion, passion, chaos_ , those are things that came naturally to him. But they are things that a Jedi must never give in to.”

"But you thought...before that he- was he a bad person? Would he have fallen to the dark side?” _like he did_ she finishes silently. Her mind skips over the chill of ice, a gnawing hole in the snow.

"It's not that simple, Padawan. There are light and dark sides of the Force, but in between there's quite a bit of gray. The Force doesn’t care about size or distance or the color of someone’s lightsaber.”

She huffs, out of breath, thrusting at Luke’s weaker left side, landing a glancing blow that he all but ignores.

"Han was proud and loud, talked too much, laughed too much, loved too hard," each point is accompanied by the satisfying thwack of wood on wood as he slowly pushes her backwards. 

"He held grudges, he was reckless, he was brave without even thinking about self-preservation and…” 

The toe of his right foot catches her heel and a firm nudge with the Force sends her tumbling into the coarse grass, staff at her neck before the air in her lungs is done whooshing out.

"He always shot first." 

He leans over her, sadness competing with his own flushed thrill of victory, helps her up with his flesh hand.

“But that doesn’t mean he was bad. Or dark. Maybe just an ass sometimes.”

"Then why did Kylo-"

"Han wasn't capable of this as a moody teenager," Luke doesn't even glance away from her, just flicks his hand over his shoulder.

She gasps as a rocky bluff a kilometer away groans, cracks, and falls into the ocean with a magnificent splash.

"We are all imperfect, Rey.”

 

—————

 

In the monochrome light moments before sunrise, Rey remembers what he said about the Force not caring about distance. She calls out to the stars overhead as if they are grains of sand, puts a hand over her heart, and let’s herself want something simple, pure, and greedy.

Finn is hard to explain. He’s the sound of footsteps on metal grating behind her. He’s knowing who approaches without turning around. And somewhere in the galaxy, she feels him draw a breath and smile.

_You keep figuring all this stuff out alone and an old man may begin to feel redundant_

Rey just laughs.

 

—————

 

“Have I lied to you lately?”

She hates that she can’t be sure.

 

—————

 

She’s felt Finn for weeks now, always warming her back. Poe too, he’s sunlight glinting off of jet black hair. Leia feels like cracking her knuckles before a fight. They all occupy a space in her head, in the Force, never farther away than the width of a few grains of sand.

Luke seems proud of her, pleased with the progress, how naturally this all comes. She can tell he’s finding solace in her. Not just as company, but as a Padawan, a partner, someone he can trust.

 _Smoothed by sand_ is how he puts it, the two of them, so alike.

It’s harder to be angry when you’ve never had anything to fear losing, easy to dismiss frustration when all you’ve ever had is hope. She has more to fear now, with people she loves, not just the faceless _maybe_ that never came, and battles they can’t afford to lose. But it’s a fear that makes her want to blaze like the desert sun, fight without hesitation, grasp to that perpetual hope and sharpen it against her optimism.

She never feels _him_ , though, never blows a breath upon the dusty web between them to clear a path. She's not sure if she can, must less _should_ and that's one question Luke has never deigned to answer. She just knows that she misses so much now. Misses hating him with simple fierceness, misses judging him with absolute purity. 

She misses Jakku. 

“It’s funny, I really never think about leaving,” she murmurs, committing the sight of the choppy sea to memory, suddenly struck with the devastating notion that she may never lay eyes on it again.

Luke doesn’t need her to explain, the context is obvious in her tone.

“But we will, wont we? Soon?”

Luke nods, “I’ve felt that, too. Although,” he cracks an apologetic smile, “I have no idea where we’ll go.”

She chuckles, “You know, I’ve suspected for a while now that you’re just making all this up as you go.”

He doesn’t deny it, just nods again to himself, straightening his back like a decisions been made, shoulders squaring.

“Yes, soon. But first, lightsaber sparring, no more practice blades.”

She starts to argue that they only have the one saber, but his hand is already outstretched. There’s a whistling on the horizon that grows into a low buzz. She associates the sound with the sun rising, with rain beginning to fall, it tugs at something in her as visceral as the changing of the tides. For an instant she panics at the sight of metal hurtling towards them ( _it winds around the dunes in her head, floating on a current of pure energy, a monumental presence in the Force, rising and receding with inevitability, like the freak, giant waves that occasionally pummel the shoreline_ ) but can’t process or choose a reaction before it’s upon them, snapping into Luke’s palm.

When he holds his hand out to her, it’s in perfect symmetry with their first meeting almost a year earlier. His eyes are expectant.

“It may not have been a lie, but I have been keeping something from you.”

She’s terrified to take the handle from him, remembering all too well the first time she touched a Jedi’s weapon.

“Take it, Rey. It’s yours.”

Nothing is buried by sand forever.

 


	2. shibboleth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The similarities are ruinous, his nephew and her, snapping into place to form complementary angles. Objectively, she knows this, knows that the hungry girl of last year, lean in fat and muscle and tenderness, would have been rent apart, a sapling in a maelstrom.

Her back is to him, staring at the rough sea, counting the whitecaps to steady the roiling in her core, in her joints, firing in every nerve. She shivers without being cold, feels stiff and liquid at the same time. The wind shrieks as it passes through the rocky buttes and she’s thankful for any sound that staggers the silence. 

"You didn't need to know until now."

"Didn't need- didn't?" she rounds at him, the sun setting behind him casts his face in shadow, his silhouette in sharp relief. He'd look like a statue, an idol of some long forgotten religion _(maybe that's all they are now)_ , but for the swaying of his robes in the breeze, his hair subtly brushing his brow.

"Who are you to say what I've needed? I needed a past, Luke, a name! You denied me my _name_."  

He steps back from her, spreading his hands out in a placating way. The unfamiliar lightsaber is still in his grasp, appreciably more narrow than his, more skeletal, and she feels herself scrambling up the side of a dune to get away from it. 

"You should have told me," she all but spits. 

He has the audacity to be calm, to project affection and comfort and sympathy towards her. That's the worst part of it. She knows he can't fully understand, not really, but he's close to it and he's trying and he's fine with letting her temper flare. 

"I did. The first moment we met." 

Something that's too close to deception twists in her guts. He's right, though, her memory slices at her because he did. He exhaled _Tatooine_ before he ever spoke a word, as if he recognized the scent on her, like it was a diagnosis. But she was too new, too lost in her own desert to see that it wasn't a question. It was a confession. 

"I'll leave you alone."

She wails inside with the words. 

_That's the last thing I needed_  

 

—————

 

She channels all of it into the Force. Every cut she cleaned herself, every bite that couldn’t hope to sustain, every time the darkness of her bolt hole clawed its way into her chest and scraped at her ribs and the creaking of metal said _how much is a girl worth_ , she shoves it into that constant current. The wind is howling now but it’s coming from her lungs, the practice blade in splinters at her feet. She jabs a hand at a boulder nearby, spitefully intent to shove it into the swirling water below. 

It refuses to move. 

Her knees buckle and she cries.

 

—————

 

Outside of her awareness, a million miles away and no farther than a knife’s blade, he hears the tumult as if from the bottom of a well, echoing up from someplace hidden but always present. The icy pit of a man traces the edges of her sorrow with a fingertip, frowning and confused. This is what he had wanted, after all, her colossal potential finally siphoning strength from her tragic, aching history. 

But it doesn’t work. 

It refuses to move. 

He stares at his grandfather’s warped visage, the acrid smell of bubbling metal and plastic still clinging to the molecules, and his frown deepens. 

 

—————

 

Sunrise will be upon them in barely an hour when she finally ducks under the stone lintel of their doorway. He’s sitting at the rough hewn table, waiting, a pair of horn cups and a stoppered bottle of Spice liquor between them. The two lightsabers feel like coiled snakes on the hearth. 

The bottle has only appeared twice before: the first time she landed a blow while sparring and the first time she beat him at _sabacc_. A bitter shadow wants to insist this isn’t a _celebration_ , but she bites it back. 

The boulder’s continued presence on the islet proves she’s no stronger giving into those notions. 

She gestures to the lightsaber as she settles onto the stool across from him, “I won’t touch that here.”

He nods, understanding her reluctance to invite that into their home, something so emotional, volatile and jarring. Something that hints of betrayal.  

He reaches for the bottle, the fire flickers, penumbra like flower petals on the table, “You understand, don’t you? My…hesitation.” His hand shakes the smallest bit, he’s more generous than usual with the alcohol. 

He says _hesitation_ because Jedi should not feel fear. 

She’s stubborn enough to not agree but he feels it all the same. 

“Another padawan of mine, desperate to honor the legacy of a grandfather they never met? Men more imperfect and complicated than history or anecdotes could ever describe? It’s a little too on the nose for me.” 

The similarities _are_ ruinous, his nephew and her, snapping into place to form complementary angles. Objectively, she knows this, knows that the hungry girl of last year, lean in fat and muscle and tenderness, would have been rent apart, a sapling in a maelstrom. 

_Yes_ , she understands.

“I want to know about him. I want to know about all of them.”

“Of course,” Luke’s eyes are shining, because despite the years, despite the unrecognizable reality of the present, it seems like this pain is still the freshest. 

“I called him ‘Ben’.” 

 

—————

 

This is what he tells her:

Leia was angry for a very long time. It waxed and waned, sometimes simply the barest, tiniest buzzing like non-diegetic music. It was deeper and more profound in those desperate moments when a woman, regardless of power, age, and maturity, just wants her mother. Her wedding day, the initial flutter of movement in her belly, the first second _third_ time her husband storms out and she’s not totally sure she wants him to come back. 

She misses both her mothers, the one she lost and the one that was never hers to lose. 

She can blame one man for both. 

Luke takes her to Tatooine, a place she hasn’t set foot on since that terrible business with the Hutts, for closure, he says. Because even if she doesn’t want to develop her skills with the Force, holding onto the that kind of resentment isn’t _healthy_. 

He reasoned that seeing where their father was born, grew, the same unforgiving landscape that shaped her twin, only with the abhorrent stamp of _slavery_ upon him, might contextualize his actions. 

“I felt you,” Luke’s voice quavers, as if he’s experiencing it in real time, “As soon as we broke atmo, I felt you somewhere in the sand.”

 

—————

 

There was no love lost between Luke and her father. 

“I think he always knew I’d come someday, to try and take you. He didn’t know much of the Force, just enough to sense it in you. Just enough to hate it. He told me that he’d never met his father, met Obi-Wan. Didn’t know the bigger picture, the whole story, until after the war. And by then, who could I possibly have been to him? The reason his father was a mystery, the reason he chose to live as a hermit in a rock instead of raising his son.” 

_Imperfect_ , it's a gloomy title that hangs over all of them. 

“He said ‘no,’ of course,” Luke sedately sips at his drink, “And we left. Leia was…conflicted, to say the least, even she could feel the power in you. She said it would be for the greater good.” 

Rey wants to laugh, something hollow and cutting. How much damage had been done because someone was fighting for the abstract _greater good?_

He clears his throat and shifts on the stool, “I’m not going to lie to you, Rey, I was always going to come back for you. I'm not proud of that, in retrospect. But I was arrogant, and I convinced myself I knew what was best.”

“Because of what I would be capable of,” she thinks of his contradictory feelings towards his nephew, training him only because he was more dangerous in raw form, it leaves a sour taste in her mouth. The watery light outside is solidifying into mid-morning and her legs have begun to ache, but she presses on. Like drawing poison from a bite, she needs to get it all out at once. 

“For the most part,” Luke swallows, “And because you were… _his_ , in a way. And I think, I already thought…you belonged with me, with us, more than with your own father. The last of the Jedi, rebuilding what Obi-Wan…" the cup creaks as his prosthetic hand grips it tighter.

"Anyway, that was always the plan. Eventually, I was going to take you from him.”

But after that, there were no more plans. When they left Tatooine, Ben was gone.

When they left Tatooine, Leia no longer had a son.  

 

—————

 

“My mother?” 

He looks stricken even though he knew the question was coming, “Childbirth was never simple in a place like Anchorhead.”  

Another parallel that stabs them.

 

—————

 

“And Jakku?”

“I have no idea how you ended up on Jakku, truthfully, but,” he pauses, tilting his head while conversing with himself silently, “Whoever did…was either very cruel or very sentimental, leaving you in another desert.”

 

—————

 

Rey doesn’t ask if her father is alive. It seems needlessly callous, when she already knows the answer. Her father is the same place all their fathers are.

 

—————

 

“Did he…”

Luke smiles abruptly, “Thank you, an easy one. Yes. Wholly. More than I can fathom. Yes, he loved you.” 

 

—————

 

He goes somewhere for the afternoon, to meditate most likely, and to give her space.

She can't decide if she's surprised by everything he's told her, or if it was always running in her head, like when her holopad hasn't finished loading a book. It's there, it's in there, but she can't see it.

Her memories are still gaping chasms, but now that she knows what they should look like, the outline of the holes are easy to pick out. 

She has a name now. _Kenobi_. It doesn't make her feel better though, no worse, but no better. It's heavy, the three syllables reverberate as if a gong is struck when she thinks them, practices them out loud. They trip her tongue up.

She was allowed to be small before, just some girl, a dirty, skinny scavenger as anonymous and unimportant as a mouse. When she was scared or tired or overwhelmed, she was allowed to run. Because no one was there to chase her.

There can be no running now. She's realizing that her name means that she has to be big, at least for the time being. If they make it far enough, little magpie girls will know her name, will think of her as myth, something whispered along side _Skywalker_.

The weight she suddenly feels is responsibility. Her power is her birthright, her inheritance, and it comes at a considerable price. It's a lonely notion, so she guesses it's for the best that she's already really good at lonely.

They stayed up all night, talking and drinking, and it's easy to blame her spontaneous decision on that, on her bubbling emotions and hazy head.

She closes her eyes and turns away from the desert, pushing a path into the snow until she feels him beside her. A brush of her fingers against the taut skin of the scar she gave gets his attention. It nearly engulfs her, his panic at her presence.

_I think I understand_

The frigid wood that symbolizes their connection begins to quake and warp, the thin trees groaning around them as he urgently shoves her out of his mind.

As the link between them whips closed, she thinks

_I could have been like you_

Somehow, she is sure he heard her. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trying to get this guy going plot wise!


	3. anagnorisis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At first the disturbance from afar is faint, subtle enough that even as it grows, it goes unnoticed. Quickly it flourishes into something akin to a pulsing vibration, but only butting against her hard enough that her eyes snap around, searching for the source. 
> 
> Realization chills her like snow on her back. 
> 
> He wants something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> remember this? it's only been like...weeks...

Luke reappears the next day, a haphazardly assembled comm unit tucked under one arm. She recognizes one of the amplifiers from a broken down solar droid. 

If he felt her reach out to his nephew, he says nothing. 

Just grins like he can't help it.

"It'll be good to see Chewie again." 

\----------

It _is._

\----------

A great many things have changed when she steps off the _Falcon_ in D'Qar. 

In the year that she's been gone, the base has been broken down, abandoned, salvaged, and then recently re-manned. Most faces are unfamiliar, and the ones that strike a cord are fewer and fewer. People have gone and people are _gone,_  there are jokes she can’t pick up on, acronyms she feels too self-conscious to ask about, and she’s uneasy. 

Not about anything too unreasonable, like embarrassment or looking ignorant, Luke quickly drove that from her more vulnerable spaces, but that it’s been _too long._ That the immediate feeling: that she was part of a pair, that Finn belonged to her and that she was his, has faded. She’s nervous that the reckless honesty and unconditional camaraderie was nothing more than a lack of options. Maybe whatever they found in each other couldn’t survive distance and time and the fact that she is returning under a distinct and immutable label: Jedi. 

When they met she was just a scavenger.

But it is unchanged: the flash of Finn's teeth against his lips, the texture of Poe's jacket under her calloused fingertips. He grips her to his chest and breathes like he’s been panting for far too long. 

There’s more pain there, now, which she did not expect. For that first afternoon, when they don’t leave each other’s side and he’s dragging her around to experience his favorite sights ( _Did you ever think, Rey? I know you've_ heard _about pools but have you ever…_ ) she’s too intertwined with him to realize the disquiet isn’t her own. 

She sees him in so many layers now, his feelings are broadcast with unflinching openness, and when she catches sight of him from the corner of her mind's eye, she'll glimpse cracked, pale armor. Redness smeared across bone white. 

Sometimes she’s physically sore from the heaviness in his chest, the one that he tries to cough out or sob out or drown out with the astringent liquor Poe pilfered from the rubble at Maz’s cantina. 

"I never hurt anyone as a 'trooper," his voice is tight, the stars are pinpricks of glitter in his vast pupils, reflecting off the tears that won't be falling. 

They're huddled in a stand of trees west of the base, close enough to hear the perpetual din but hidden from sight, picked at packs of rations and empty wine bottles scattered amongst the dry leaves. "I never even shot my blaster. Not one damn time." 

His body heat beside her feels cold in her mind. 

"That's not true anymore." 

"Finn..." she tries to be calming, but his sieve of a heart collapses with startling intensity. The regret and guilt is corrosive, it eats away at her until she withdraws from him, seeking the familiar, scarred solidity of her AT-AT within, something she has never had to do before. 

The agitation dims, as if the tumult and upset is farther away, and she earmarks the act, knows that this is important. That she isn’t just keeping Finn out, she’s holding herself _in._  

He shakes his head, drags a hand down his face, "When I kill people now, because I do kill people now, Rey, it’s like...it's like...maybe none of them have ever shot a blaster either. Maybe every single one of them was about to run like me."

"This is a war, Finn. We aren't given a lot of good choices. But at least now you get to make your own, when before they never let you."  

"Exactly," his eyes are flat and dry when he looks at her. "That was..." she hears _better_ seep through the wall, and sighs as it evaporates at Finn’s untainted nature, “easier."

\----------

Later, over lukewarm cups of caf in the mess, she sees Poe kneel beside a still somber Finn, he puts a tan hand on his knee. He says something too low to hear with an ironic smile and she feels a sensation akin to regaining her footing sweep across the room. There are stars in Finn's eyes again, in perfect opposition to the stinging specks of before. 

Rey frowns, never feeling more unlike her comrade. Finn’s heart is treacherous, unreliable, too full or near tapped out. It’s either bursting from breaking or breaking from bursting. 

It seems like a terribly, achingly wonderful way to live. 

That’s when she realizes that yes, a great many things have changed, but one thing that hasn’t is 

_Finn would have been a shit Jedi, too._

\----------

She makes the decision, in essence because a question won’t cease nagging at her. But finding him, stretching herself thin enough that she spans the enormity of the galaxy to jog at his heels, is unnatural.

It is the intersection of two things she is still adjusting to: 

a sense of privacy and _doors_

When people ask her what her favorite part of the great, wide galaxy is, she says rain. 

It move her honestly and profoundly, and when it used to roll in as a subtle mist or a vibrating clamor on Ahch-To, she reeled at the unstoppable majesty of it. It always felt like it was baptizing her, not necessary washing her clean, but seeping into her thirstiest parts, trying to fill an ever draining cup. 

But _also_ , on a more selfish, human level, she loves having a door. 

Luke’s sanctuary provided comparable privacy to her AT-AT: it was an enclosed space but it was never truly secure. It was the same there, she had a room to call her own but just a length of cloth as a barrier to shared space. 

That’s why she has such trouble, both entering his space and… 

 well, it’s not _knocking,_ she’s still not used to that. It’s more like trying to catch someone’s attention from across a crowded room and oh, shit, she’s pacing now, the height of her ceiling giving her footfalls an inappropriate gravity. She resolves to not be so sober next time. 

His enormous scope of attention finally falls on her, notices her intent. It then focuses, hones in until she can feel him trying to eavesdrop, worm his way into her eyes and ears, a pressure that’s intangible and indescribable,. 

She’s ready, though, if she can lock out someone she _loves_ , it’s not challenge to keep him at arm’s length. He barely gets the gist of her emotional state, and she stares at him defiantly, even though he probably hardly feels a ping of it. 

She has the question prepared, 

 

_How much of this was your choice?_

 

He gives her even less, no sense of emotion or distance, he’s just a voice on the other end of a comm. But when he speaks, the words are vicious, barbed and metal. He’s static, gnarled, acid. 

 

 _All of it_  

 

She bites her lip, blood filling the hollows between her teeth, and he turns away. 

\----------

“Did you feel it?” Luke is too calm for the significance of his question, too awake for the new morning, striding towards her before she's even closed her door. She just nods. Of _course_ he was watching, of course he was aware. 

“Tell me,” he insists.

Rey wants to smile, but this is no happy thing. 

“He lied.” 

_He never had a choice._

_\----------_

“Luke doesn’t want me to get my hopes up,” Leia says ironically. They’ve lagged behind at a recon meeting, sipping on room temperature water while Rey is thoroughly sized up.    

“He should be worried about himself, you know. He was always the least…pragmatic of us all.” 

Rey can’t help the disbelieving look she pulls but Leia just laughs, “I mean it. He’s too normal, he was raised by nice, decent people. I was raised by politicians, was one before anything else,” she spreads her hands out over the table. “You have to be realistic to get anything done.”

“Trust me, General, in that sense, scavengers are exactly the same.”

“Then be realistic with me.”

Rey pokes at her mind but Leia has enough training for rudimentary veils and she's loathe to slice her way in. 

“I can’t help but think that we don’t know anything more than before. It’s definitely possible that he…had no real say in anything that happened to him. But… just because all of _this_ ,” she fights the urge to flap her hands dramatically, “wasn’t necessarily up to him, doesn’t mean he didn’t want it, or maybe didn’t…care.”

“That’s a fairly diplomatic answer,” Leia peers at her over the top of her nose

Rey tenses, she wasn’t raised for politics but is finding it fairly self-evident, and knows well enough that when people say _diplomacy_ they usually just mean seeing the bigger picture. 

“Saving your son means nothing if we don’t win the war.”

If its a hardhearted thing to say, Leia doesn’t flinch, if anything she looks impressed despite herself.

“And there’s the realistic answer.”

Rey hasn’t ever been one to lose sight of the bigger picture.

——————-

The day is warm as she hikes the stubby woods around base. Luke was appropriately good-natured when he tasked her to find someplace new suited for meditation (their last spot’s energy was ruined with her and Finn’s emotional litter, after all), and she her skin has gotten bizarrely pale, so she doesn’t mind the setting. 

It’s a rare moment of peace, and she takes advantage of the time to simply flow, brush her knuckles against rough bark, study how her feet balance on the spongy forest floor below. 

The Force swells around her like she's swimming back in the sheltered inlet on Ahch-To, half submerged and bobbing. 

At first the disturbance from afar is faint, subtle enough that even as it grows, it goes unnoticed. Quickly it flourishes into something akin to a pulsing vibration, but only butting against her hard enough that her eyes snap around, searching for the source. 

Realization chills her like snow on her back. 

He wants something.

He's _knocking._  

She drops her hand to Luke’s lightsaber on her hip and shutters closed every opening she has, striding back with strictly controlled dread. 

Meditation can wait. 

\----------

She comes back into awareness mid conversation in the chronologically ambivalent way of dreams. She is unable to recall a starting point to the interaction, because in reality, this is probably it. 

She slaps her palms on the table before her, ”I am asleep. Even for you this is an _unacceptable_ invasion-"

"You ignored me. I find _that_ unacceptable," he speaks to her like he's reprimanding a child and she knows its half to needle at her, half simply because it's his way. "You've insisted on having my attention before."  

She flares at having her manners compared to someone like him and he leans back, crossing his arms, amused. 

It doesn't strike her as odd that his helmet isn't present, she's probably the only person who has seen it off of him more than on. 

The scar she knows she left on his face is missing too, but if it's because it hasn't yet integrated into her or his perception of him is unclear. 

Rey tries to take in their surroundings. They’re sitting in a tiny and dim, squat, crumbling construction. A doorway to the left is nothing more sophisticated than a gaping hole that takes up a good third of a wall. The aperture looks out onto an impossible desert. Miles just chase more miles of chillingly symmetrical and even dunes, she forces herself to look away as the double suns make her eyes water. 

Her gaze sweeps back to him, stoic and sharp-edged even in just a black tunic, tailored pants, and sturdy boots, and senses that this diorama is his design. But he sits in it with such contempt. 

“This is how you think I lived?” she arches an eyebrow at his condescending smile. She knows enough to know that while they aren’t really _anywhere_ , the location is meant as an intentional jab. He's underestimated how much peace she's already made with the past. 

“How little imagination,” she levels a stare at him and endeavors to sound a touch disappointed. He seems unbothered. 

"Did the traitor die?" he asks evenly.

"Why do you care?" she spits before she can stop herself, leaning over the table.

"Curiosity," he scowls, "Humor me."

She peers at him skeptically and wiggles her fingers, "Can't you...feel it?"

"The Force doesn't work that way," he huffs out, patience already running short. She can envision him repeating that statement a million times as a frustrated boy, desperate to make someone understand. 

He narrows his eyes, "No, you would be much angrier if I had killed him."

She purses her lips and gives nothing up.

"It looks like seclusion has helped my uncle as a teacher," he segues smoothly.

"Because I'm stronger," she states the plain fact. _Stronger than you, maybe_ is all but actually spoken. 

"Because you aren't scared."

She snorts, "Not anymore. Not of you."

"Of much of anything," he motions carelessly to his head. "I used to feel it, it'd buzz. I think it was there my whole life; that's how big your fear was."

She's not sure how to respond to that so she chooses not to. Their eyes meet and it registers that he feels appreciably different, too. If anything, his fear has grown, flourished and rooted even deeper since their last meeting. 

But it makes him more tolerable, somehow. Makes the chord he strikes against the Force ring a little more human. The panic that scaffolds everything about him isn't selfish anymore, merely desperation to prevent his own failure. It's a more intelligent terror, based in fact and not insecurity. While her fears are ebbing away, he is now scared of _everything._

As if he can hear her thoughts, he artfully shuts himself closed tighter and says, "It's gone now."

Before the silence that blankets the scene can grow into something awkward, she stands and walks to the doorway, putting some space between them. She steps softly into a pocket of light, soaks in a little warmth from the suns, feels it steady her even if it's only imaginary.

"Is that why you wanted to see me? To see how far I've come?"

Now it's his turn to be mute. When she glances at him, he's still peering at her.

"Yes," he finally confirms. 

"And how should I tell Luke that you find my progress?"

He grunts, "I approve." 

She whips around to sneer at the assumed sarcasm.

"I mean it," he assures her and she only gets honestly off of him, "I think I prefer you like this."

"Oh, what an honor that is," she deadpans, pivoting back towards the doorway. She gets no joy out of his approval. If he has spent most of his life feeling her fear, she is only happy that has ceased. 

He fidgets, “I know you won’t let me teach you, Rey…but what was said on _Starkiller,_ that clearly isn't-"

"Where are we?" she interrupts. He glares at the perceived rudeness of the outburst. She studies the sky.

 _He's felt it my whole life_ Maybe it's the dream, but this piece of data seems so essential, but so hard to process.    

"If you're so offended that I-"

She hold a hand up, suddenly numb, "Why are there two suns?" 

The expression of misgiving looks so at home on his face that she mourns it when it's replaced by wrath. 

"Why would we be on Tatooine?" she whispers. 

The answer is obvious immediately and she wishes violently that she could swat it away. Everything around them being to crumble. The room twists and loses shape as he jolts to his feet, closing the short distance between them. 

"What do you know?" he growls.

"Do you know about Jakku?" she demands, finding her voice again, a sliver more of strength. She steps outside and out of his reach, slipping on the surreal, fictitious sand.

"What has Luke _told you?_ " he roars. " _What has he told you about Tatooine?_ ”

“Tell me about Jakku!” she screams, still retreating, stumbling as she backs into the nascent angle of a dune.

He looms over her, suddenly blocking out the shine from overhead and she realizes a bit belated, that while she is strong now, he is still so very _dangerous._ In a way that she never will be.

He’s snapping energy, a live wire, void of control, of patience. Unable to to see anything past his own monumental presence in his head. 

Her fears may have lessened but enough survive. She panics as he moves, only a pace left between them, and reaches out for her AT-AT. It’s the only place she can think of in the moment, the only place she knows he can’t follow. 

His face dissolves and she howls, _“_ What did you _do,_ Ben?”

\----------

Rey sobs in the shadow of her long lost home. From feelings that have no name, that she’s sure no other human has ever experienced before. It’s wonderful like seeing an undiscovered color, like being the first to name something. 

She stays until she is calm, reacquaints herself with the texture of authentic sand, and wakes. 

\----------

As sunlight creeps across the floor, she’s already standing at the foot of Luke’s bed. 

“Where?" 

He frowns.

"Give me my grandfather’s lightsaber.”

He rises.  

 


	4. kairos

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They cannot meet. 
> 
> “Are you afraid that you will kill him…” she remembers his request all those months ago, while she remained blanketed in the illusion of safety on their beach. The preemptive appeal to keep him honest. “Or that you will let him kill you?”

Rey snaps awake that morning, snagging the fraying edges of her flickering control and precarious balance. As she rouses Luke, she can barely speak. She doesn’t have any words. Her face probably reads _mad,_ but mad barely touches the farthest edges, barely deserves to describe it. 

She is free falling, drowning, on fire and completely numb. Never so uncertain before, each thought it’s own screaming voice demanding attention. Each question warping and shattering into an infinite chorus of more. Unending unknowns, gnawing injustice, and this unyielding desperation to snatch a ship and stampede across the stars and strangle him with her bruised, bloody, and _bare hands._  

“Rey,” Luke takes her wrist and squeezes it firmly, until her eyes focus on him and she lets herself sink onto the edge of the bed beside him. “Tell me.” 

He says it so passively that she almost misses the slight pressure in the words. It is hardly there, the compulsion, more like a hint. It hums _you are fine_ and _you are safe_ and _I will help you._

She shoots him a watery frown that says the manipulation hasn’t gone unnoticed but does nothing to fight it. 

“We can deal with this, Rey,” he reminds her confidently.

She purses her lips and feels tears slip into the creases.  

\----------

Luke stares directly ahead as he leads her across the base and to the hangars. She’s still a vibrating, sparking mess, but she isn’t caving in as she was scant  moments ago.

It strikes her as soon as the _Falcon_ comes into sight, that she barely even thought before barging into his room. That her reliance on his advice and unbiased ear and soothing presence has become something that she can’t imagine easily living without. 

It plucks at a place in her, somewhere completely untouched. There are no roots in the desert. 

“Thank you,” she murmurs as they step up to the ship, staring at the exterior blast shields. 

Luke twists a hand and the docking bay slowly grinds open. 

He continues to simply look ahead and smiles, “Sure thing.”

Even their soft steps make an echoing clatter while Luke leads her to the engine room, gesturing with his chin towards a seldom-used smuggling niche in the bulkhead. 

She pries the panel open, and she can imagine the tenor of the entire world shifting at the weapon's exposure. 

"Rey," Luke is back at the doorway, "All the answers you want may not be here. You _can_ handle that, alright?"

She swallows around a dry tongue and nods, "You won't stay?" Her teeth clench, still so unpracticed at dependency. 

"I'll be right outside," he opens and closed his mouth as if to say more, but just knocks on the metal door jam a couple times and steps away.

There’s a beat of suffocating silence, her blood swirling through her heart the only sound to comfort her.

Then it’s in her hand. 

\----------

Rey sees thousands of sunsets over Tatooine. 

Rey sees the world inside her mother: everything dark and pink and thrumming.

Rey sees the rosy glow become the terrible, lurching carmine halo of a lightsaber.

Her universe is red.

She whirls, the hyperdrive that is suddenly nearby makes a terrible howl as they streak through space. She catches a glimpse of herself as a child, resolute and tear stained, glaring up at a stranger in black. 

“ _Why?_ ” they seem to plead together, in echoing unison, “ _Don’t!”_

She lunges forward, driven more by desperation than actual strategy-

 

but the floor gives way beneath her, the man in black twisting into a likeness not so far from Kylo Ren’s. The red lightsaber in his hands buzzes with mindless intention. 

As she scrambles backwards down the hall that is already dissolving, a voice sounds from behind her.

“If you strike me down, I shall become more…”

She whips around, catching the briefest glimpse of an aged man and _knows him,_ the curve of his jaw is unmistakable, the lilt in his voice a cadence as familiar as her own. 

Her mouth has enough time to shape a vowel, just a tiny “oh” before he is gone-

 

and she’s plunged into another room, small, square and occupied. 

He’s hunched over as if freezing, face agonized and overwrought. 

“Show me, Grandfather…” he practically begs. She looks down and feels herself go icy as well, recognizing with flooding horror the charred and deformed remnants of an onyx mask. 

The revulsion makes her flee, skidding clumsily on the shiny, chilly floor-

 

She hauls herself to her feet and automatically adjusts to the give of sand beneath her. The suns of Tatooine are setting in brilliant, angry reds behind a series of wind-carved rock features, and she is crying. 

It’s her as a child again, hugging her legs to her chest, crouching in the doorway of a humble house built into the rock. She begins to weep with her, although she may not have stopped this whole time.

“Rey-“ the voice comes from the shadows inside.

She stills, both versions of them, chins suddenly stoney. 

“I will not go,” the child warbles. “I keep my father’s home.” 

“I have said you are not _safe here_ ,” it scolds. 

The girl curls into a tighter ball, “I’m not safe with _you_ , either!”

As he steps into the light of the open doorway, she feels surprisingly relieved that it’s him. He’s young, so young, not many years behind her now. He’s already tall, still crackling with frenetic potential, but it’s as if it is on a delay. His demeanor before her and his manifestation in the Force are both unfocused, blurry, like his volatile lightsaber. Like something unmoored. 

“You don’t even _know_ me,” he argues, already at wits end, and she grimaces at the transparent inexperience and immaturity.

The child’s presence takes on a sharp command, finally unfurling, confidence fed by certainty, “I _do_ know you. I’ve known you a long time, whoever you are! You are _loud,”_ she chides timorously. “Angry. And so _sad_ you get me sick from it, no matter how far away you’ve always been.”

He squats so they are eye level, grabbing her around the arm and jerking her more upright, “And I know you, kid. You’re loud, too.”

He raises his other hand, a threat, and she stiffens.

“I’m not safe with _you_ ,” she reiterates. 

He let’s his hand drop, suddenly more adrift than before, and stares past her into the desert. 

“You won’t be with me.” 

\----------

She's cried so much over the past 12 hours that she feels dried out from it. But she remembers her father’s face.

\----------

“How long was I in there?” Rey asks. She’d trundled down the _Falcon’s_ gangway on wobbly legs, the heirloom heavy on her hip. Luke was waiting with a relieved grin mere feet away.

“A few very, _very_ long minutes.”

\----------

Leia drops two tablets into a glass of water, her expression pointed over the slight fizz. She sets it on the nightstand beside her.

Rey swallows nervously, “I’m sure this isn’t necessary, really.”

“I insist,” Leia’s tone isn’t devoid of humor. “Really.”

\----------

She sleeps and dreams of the sunset on Tatooine. Raspy, dry, whistling snatches of thought. 

She bathes. She pretends not to notice when she isn’t invited to the ordinance and recon and intel meetings.

Luke, to his credit, doesn’t try to coddle her, not _much_. The next morning they have a prolonged meditation session, his monotone voice guiding her through the fortification of her mental and emotional defenses. There will be no more unwanted guests in her mind. 

Then he sends her back to bed and she doesn’t see him for two days.

“Rest isn’t just for your body,” Poe muses while he ambles beside her in that maddeningly causal way of his. 

He taps her forehead a couple times when they reach her door, “If the Force uploaded files straight into _my_ head, I’d probably take it easy for a couple days, too.”   

He laughs at the look on her face. 

“The Force doesn't _work_ that way.”

She sleeps and dreams of the suns on her neck, burning with a comfortable inevitably. 

She seeks out the other young people, Jessica and Poe, but mostly Finn, tugs him away from reviewing ballistics protocols and lets him hold her hand while they stroll around the parameter, poking through forgotten cargo containers or skipping rocks across a nearby pond.

She’s delighted when he reminds her that swimming lessons were compulsory as a growing Stormtrooper. They spend the afternoon timing each other’s laps while Poe dozes in the grass, head propped against BB-8. 

It’s a short, sweet respite in the middle of a war. She can almost pretend, floating on her back, tracking the clouds as they stutter across the sky, that she has only ever known this kind of peace.

There is a sudden shriek from shore that jerks her up in an instant, splashing ungracefully as her feet reach for a bottom that isn’t there. 

Finn’s deep laughter rolls over the water as she rights herself. BB-8 barrels away, chittering disapprovingly while Poe shakes lake water from his thick hair.

\---------- 

But it can’t last, and it doesn’t. 

She’s already awake and dressed when Luke taps on her door. She already has the lightsaber strapped to her hip. 

They trek far into the woods, to a sparse stretch of forest dotted with clearings. She can hear a creek nearby. 

Luke sheds his cloak, hefts his lightsaber up and frowns at it. 

“This won’t be like with the wooden swords,” he emphasizes. “I know you understand, on some level. You saw what one did to Finn, and felt what it did to you.” 

He holds up his prosthetic hand, something she’s so accustomed to she barely notices it anymore, “Jedi aren’t known for keeping their limbs. This is the life you’re choosing.”

 _Did I?_ she asks herself, quickly hoping her walls are still high enough that Luke doesn’t hear. _Did I choose this any more than Ben did?_

But she _could_ have done differently. She could have gone with Ben. She could have ran with Finn. She could have limped back to Jakku and been driven mad by the life unfulfilled. 

“It is,” she affirms aloud, and it’s true, in a way, in all the ways that count.

When Luke ignites the saber, his expression is a bit cocky. 

“I am sorry,” he informs her, a bushy eyebrow quirked. 

Rey shakes her head, “For what?”

“I’m really good at this.”

\----------

He holds back at first, she knows he does, can feel the restraint as second nature to him as putting one foot in front of the other. But she still comes home dotted with little burns, darkened singes speckling her clothes. Jessica wrinkles her nose at the smell of scorched hair that clings to her. 

“You’re head is going to look like Chewie’s before long,” she prophesies. 

They practice basic battle forms, first in a clearing, then in the woods, dodging trunks and branches. Later, he drills her on the same combinations backed against the creek, edging towards a sheer drop off. When her clothes manage to more or less survive the day, he ups the difficulty, running through each terrain again until she’s mastered it. 

 _Again,_ he always says, sometimes in between pieces of advice or earned praise, sometimes it stands alone. _Again._

It’s a stark difference to his previous training: a little laissez-faire. These sessions are organized, disciplined, militaristic. She’s exhausted when they finally drag themselves to base and, more often than not, injured. 

It’s exponential: the better she gets the harder he pushes the more she gets hurt. 

_Again._

The more it hurts the harder she pushes herself.

 _“You can’t bleed in here!”_ Chewie scolds as they hustle through his workroom, the most direct path to the medbay. 

Rey looks down and isn’t surprised to see a polka dot trail of blood meandering back into the field outside. 

Luke seems to be racing them to something, like time is short, as if things must change soon. The pace is not sustainable. 

_Again._

\----------

Finally, one day, like a shift in the seasons or any other unavoidable, impending event, she is _very_ hurt. It happens out of no where, as they’re winding down for the day. She’s fending off the urge to go a little sluggish in the afternoon heat but that’s no excuse. 

They’re near the creek, the ambient gurgle a comforting lull, but that’s not an excuse either. 

She feels Luke shift his weight, switching his upward jab into a clean arc with the flexing of his wrists. She adjusts, but not fast enough, and suddenly there’s blue in her periphery and she can feel Luke’s panic like a tidal wave before she even feels an electric searing in her upper arm. 

All in one instant, he curses, blood evaporates, and there’s a _whoosh_ as both sabers retract simultaneously. 

She glances down for only a second. It’s still attached, that’s all she cares about.

\----------

Dr. Kalonia is unimpressed. 

“You’ll keep the arm.” 

She doses a groggy Rey with another antibiotic cocktail. After the twilight weightlessness of a night in the tank, the firm bed makes her stomach clench.

“And just so we’re clear, I think this was a fairly _unnecessary_ wound,” she says it like it’s the worst insult she can muster. 

Leia frowns, “She has to be trained, Harter.” 

The taller women smiles down at Rey, a little sadly, “Oh, I’m not that shortsighted, General. But we are at war.” 

Her expression goes a little brittle, “And we only have so much _bacta_.”

Rey feels Finn like a storm cloud in the hallway. 

\----------

“You had dreams in the tank.”

She’s just finished pulling her boots on, perched on the edge of her bed, finally cleared to leave the medboy. Her head spins a bit as she sits up to look at him.

“I don’t remember,” she tells him truthfully, but her gut drops all the same. They are so easy to imagine. The itch of grit in her nose, dry wind in her eyes and mouth.

He has his robe slung over one arm, but tosses it on the cot beside her before sitting stiffly in the visitor’s chair. 

“I know what you want,” it almost sounds like an apology. There may be some things that she wished to keep _just_ for herself, but that is not in the life she’s chosen.

“Then you know why I never said it out loud,” Rey counters. It’s not an unreasonable assumption, that he would not approve. Understand, surely, but those are very different things.  

He sits before her in pants and a plain shirt, no Jedi robes, no lightsaber at his side. At first glance he just looks like a man. A bit older and weary and utterly resigned. 

“I think he’ll be there.” 

It’s a simple enough statement, a bald kind of ultimatum. Her arm throbs.

They _cannot_ meet. 

“Are you afraid that you will kill him…” she remembers his request all those months ago, while she remained blanketed in the illusion of safety on their beach. The preemptive appeal to keep him honest. “Or that you will let him kill you?”

“I am most afraid,” he confirms, shrugging, really, just a man, “of finding out those are my only two options.”

She has never called him _Master_ , and he has never asked or even mentioned it. But that is what he is, a fact as unalterable as her name. 

“Then I’ll stay,” she tries to put as much acceptance in her tone as she is able. There is _always_ the bigger picture.

But Luke only shakes his head, purses his lips, and says as he stands, “No, you need to go.” 

He gestures to the robe on the bed, the dusty brown a comforting haze against the white sheet,“That’s yours.”

He looks a little lost, “There used to be more to this, I’m sorry-“

“Luke-“ she interjects, a little lost, too.

“But it’s just you and me now,” he talks over her. “And you and I, together…” he falters, “We aren’t ceremony people, anymore.” 

She reaches a hand to him, clasps his arm where skin meets metal, and nods. If her eyes are wet, she barely cares.

“I don’t think I’m ready,” her voice breaks a little on the honesty. 

He pats her hand, more paternal than he generally would allow.

“Good.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so yeah, it's been a while...
> 
> i just want this to be good, ya know, and sometimes that means staring at it not typing for forever.


End file.
